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Our more handsome and interesting readers will recall that we spent some time arsing about it the Mortal Online beta a while back, and ended up chatting about it at length. It was a fun time. If you like incredibly hardcore sandbox MMOs, which we seem to, for some reason. Anyway, the open beta has come an end and it’s all live over there. You can watch all the trailers your series of tubes could hope to gather on the main site. Expect some reviews soon. Although I don’t know if we’ll do one, because we’ve all got our digits caught in Chinese finger traps. I’m typing this with my knees.

24 Comments

Darkfall is the only game that has give me “some” of these “random crazy cool storys” people talk about Dwarf Fortress. Like, that time there was a “Piramid of People” in a hole, with a circles of mages shotting to the piramid (to raise resistences, why a piramid? to optimize resources that are spend wen crafting the spells). Or my travel to the north, to move to my guild city. That alone can make a mini novel.
All in all, I have played darkfall longer than AION. But I have not even tried to join Mortal Online, I think because looks like the exact same game than darkfall, with highpoly models and some pretty landscapes.
I think what games like Darkfall need, is villagers and farmers,.. NPC’s that you can kill to get bad reputation and some loot. Withouth “normal people”, a city looks more like a SuperHero Congress Day, than a medieval town.

You’re a normal person. There are heavily armed and armoured psychopaths (except for the few who are naked) jumping around and shouting at each other in barely-comprehensible slang, some randomly swinging their weapons at the air, and half a dozen are trying to jump up onto the roof of a nearby house.

Seems like this one is more like a 3D Ultima Online (pre trammel, so expect to be ganked). Darkfall is a sandbox with not enough sand in it, seems this one took a slightly different direction.

Question with those indie MMOs is not really how they start (it’s often pretty bad), it’s more a matter of how they do after that. EvE is a looooong way from what is was back in the release day, and I can only wish MO to do as well. Might even give it a shot in a few months when the main launch issues have been fixed.

That’s actually true about Champions Online, too, since there are superheroes everywhere. Some days it does feel like ‘Superhero Congress Day’, and that’s fairly nifty, especially since it’s something that’s supported in the lore.

There’s not so much wrong with a world of super-people, providing that you also have super-powered NPCs, otherwise the world feels a bit dead. So Tei’s complaint might be about a lack of people, and a general lack of life, rather than, say, a lack of ‘normal people’.

Besides, I’d really like to see a superhero using their powers for farming.

“Worry not, citizen, for I shall harvest all your crops for you… at the same time! BEHOLD the magnificence of my mind muscle! Ha ha haaa!”

Yeees my mind really is like that, but I realised years ago that my mind tends to be more interesting than most, especially with what it comes up with at a moment’s notice based on absolutely any stimuli it’s provided. I once managed to absolutely terrify a group of people based on them feeding me stimuli and telling them the first thing my brain did with it.

But yes, superheroic farmhands.

That’s probably the solution, isn’t it? You have crazy, nutty people who are all superpowered to various degrees. So you have a bunch of ents attack a farmer, farmer goes nuclear, problem solved! Yes?

I wonder what I’d do as an abnormal NPC? Hm. I’d probably be a werewolf, sat up on a roof and staring at a night sky, having the odd howl just for the heck of it, and frequently laughing at the 50 or so people jumping at the base of my house trying to figure out how the hell they’re supposed to get up there to obtain whatever information I might have for them.

One of these days, I will get around to helping out with making an MMO. It’s probably my destiny, or something.

@ MWoody:
While zooming the camera in where the character’s head is in WoW, with the character becoming completely invisible, may technically be a “first-person view,” it certainly isn’t a “first-person mode,” nor was the game designed to be played that way.

Everquest is a first-person MMO and although you can technically zoom out to third-person (these days) it becomes very clear it was never meant to be played that way. Of course, it’s also terribly old and not all that fun, and totally inappropriate for anyone who wants PvP, but still. Point is, first person MMOage not a new thing.

The beta was full of promise.
Broken as all hell, but playable enough to be somewhat enjoyable, and to see all the potential.

However, I hear that the release is still quite buggy and crashy (but supposedly they’ve fixed the terrible desync problems which made things unplayable at tines), and there’s really not that much content yet. Balance is still wonky too apparently… It’s very much still in beta. Still, the beta had its moments, and it’s a pretty immersive world. The crafting system is still pretty rough, but even so it is really engaging.

This is one of those games that will get really good in a year’s time. The problem is, it might not survive a year if people aren’t willing to start playing in the empty sandbox. It would be a shame if that happened, because StarVault seem like they really can pull it off; all they need is enough money to continue for a while, and then I believe the game will boom like Eve did.

I’m afraid that will never happen, there is a reason Mortal Online is a first person view, and it is to add to immersion.

Theives/pks can sneak up on your back when your not paying attention, you control where you attack, in real time combat, the ai has improved considerably and is pretty fun to fight. It also add alot of realism to the game, something which would be less immersive if i was staring at the back of my characters head all day.

yeah i got this li8ke a decade ago too, but now my main computer is broke :(
Beta was… beta… but it could work out like Darkfall without the horrible exploits= good.
Currently im sticking with Wurm Online, which is the only 3d MMO i know of where you can leave shit lying arounnd on the floor- like in Ultima.

While I respect what they are trying to do, the animated 1st person camera makes me feel ill, and they don’t seem likely to change it. 1st person is fine, lurching back and forth when you stop and start moving is just horrible and prevents me from playing.